I am a Partner with Future Workplace, an executive development firm that assists organizations in re-thinking, re-defining and re-imagining their corporate recruiting, learning & talent management strategies to prepare for the 2020 workplace. I am the co-author of the best selling book, The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop & Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today (Harper Collins) and also the author of two books on Corporate Universities: Lessons In Building A World-Class Workforce.
I have spent much of my career in marketing, human resources, and corporate learning roles and now I consult for FORTUNE 1000 firms. I actively follow and write about mega trends of globalization, multiple generations and social media with an emphasis on how these trends impact the workplace of the future. I live in New York City and enjoy the energy of living and working among 8 million people.

The reaction to this phenomenon has been clear enough: applicants do not want to give up their privacy. “It would be a total non-starter for me,” says Michael Aleo, 26, creative director for a California start-up. “I don’t have any content on Facebook that I wouldn’t show to a prospective employer, but asking for personal login information is crossing the line.”

And the company that requests access will not only lose applicants’ respect but also miss out on talent. According to the Cisco “Connected World Technology Report,” a global survey of nearly 3,000 college students and young professionals, 40% would accept a lower-paying job that offered flexibility regarding the choice of devices to use at work, access to external social media and ability to work remotely, over a higher-paying job with less flexibility.

Giving smart employees the opportunity to work as they wish seems like a small price to pay for obtaining top talent.

2. It’s a PR disaster waiting to happen.

All it takes is a glance at Glassdoor.com or Vault.com to see just how much employees and job-hunters share about the job interview process these days – and that’s just on a couple of many virtual platforms. Word spreads quickly among the outraged, and an unpopular interview policy will turn off prospective future hires, as well as current candidates.

3. It shows a lack of understanding of what is important to Millennials.

Seventy percent of college students and young professionals are already in the habit of “friending” their colleagues, superiors or both on Facebook, according to Cisco’s report. So a human resources department that asks for passwords during the interview process not only appears out of touch, it sacrifices a permanent spot in employees’ “friend” zones in favor of becoming Big Brother.

Enlightened recruiters at companies know that building personal and professional networks is a sign of a high-performing professional, not an infantile practice that puts the company at risk. Recruiters don’t need to peek behind the curtain of password-protected profiles.

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wow this is totally insane I’m with the young professional who says that if an employer asked me for my login info to my personal social networking sites, the interview would be over and I’d tell my friends not to bother applying to that company

This is a great article. No way would I want to work for an employer who seeks to infringe on my privacy. If employers truly want to use facebook as a screening tool, better to look at whether or not I am aware of how to make and keep personal things private, which would be telling about my judgment and maturity, whether or not I read and share interesting articles, what kind of social network I have, etc., without me needed to scrub the account of anything and everything at all –and appearing to have no personality– in order to be palatable to a prospective employer.

Valerie Yes there are better ways to learn about employees. You might say asking for your Facebook password is lilke asking for your car keys! Instead companies should follow lead of PepsiCo and Gap and others and start training in social media!

I’m with Valerie Safir on this one. If a potential employer wants to snoop farther than what I make public on my facebook account, then they are spending too much time on facebook at work. Forget invasion of privacy; it’s just off the mark. As the last part of the article suggests, I would be impressed by a forward-thinking company that knows how to work with social media and use it to its advantage; snooping suggests ineptitude with a growing forum for communication (and marketing).

I can understand background checks and references, but Facebook, that’s over the line. Employers need to recognize that there are unspoken social boundaries. The companies that realize this and acknowledge those boundaries are the ones that will be successful. For example, Volkswagen is honoring their employees’ personal lives by enacting an email policy that halts business email after hours and resumes during the workday. Now that’s forward thinking!

I can understand background checks and references, but Facebook, that’s over the line. Employers need to recognize that there are unspoken social boundaries. The companies that realize this and acknowledge those boundaries are the ones that will be successful. For example, Volkswagen is honoring their employees’ personal lives by enacting an email policy that halts business email after hours and resumes during the workday. Now that’s forward thinking!

This is a non-issue, and it’s disingenuous to say “some employers”, because this entire hand-wringing episode was started by a single AP article naming a single candidate at a single unnamed company. That’s it.

Jeanne, years back when we worked together at Citigroup’s Information Business, the CEO of Sun Computers said, “There is no privacy, get over it!” Today, we see Google Ideas and other Think/Do Tanks like Technology & Marketing Ventures, recognizing that technology is relevant to every challenge in the world but solutions must cut across many diverse stakeholders. Like Wikileaks, the traditionally debated tension is Privacy versus Security. It seems to me, the debate should focus not on that tension at a very high level, but on individual accountability and responsibility versus the interests of the larger public. Do we really want a situation of ‘no secrets’ as some in hacker/social media networks argue?